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The Barbican: Past, Present and Future Professor Sir Nicholas Kenyon CBE

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The Barbican: Past, Present and Future Professor Sir Nicholas Kenyon CBE The Barbican: Past, Present and Future Professor Sir Nicholas Kenyon CBE 10 June 2021 Good evening and welcome to this annual Gresham Lecture, and many thanks to you Loyd and to Gresham College for this invitation, and sorry we have had to delay it by a year; I hope you haven’t been holding your breath. Let’s start with a minute of film from 1969…as two earnest narrators ponder in Socratic dialogue the future of the City. That extract from the film Barbican 1969 sums up nicely what I want to touch on today –the question of why the Barbican arts centre came to be, what it has evolved to be today, and what it needs to be in the future. And it gives us a continuing motto for that narrative: ‘a fuller way of life’. Through the enforced months of lockdown, I’ve had the chance to look back at some of the origins of the Barbican project in preparation for our fortieth anniversary next year: here’s a first take on the results. If you ask the question why the Barbican was built, the answer is both very simple and very complex. On the simplest level, it was created from the devastation of the Blitz in order to ensure that the City Corporation had a future. We can be clear that the vanishing residential population of the Square Mile posed an existential threat to the survival of the Corporation, with its independent governance and its long traditions, for there was a serious possibility in the post-war years that, without residents and voters, there might be a move to incorporate the City into the London County Council. In London, the City had been among the most severely damaged of all areas. St Paul’s escaped destruction And its overgrown surroundings were still a lunchtime haunt for City workers who at that point were not expected to work from home. But the buildings around and to the north of St Paul’s had been comprehensively destroyed, where (as Pevsner noted) one could walk for over half a mile without passing a single standing structure. The basic question facing the City was whether to rebuild the area on the existing street plan, or to attempt a much more radical reimagining of the area. This was a debate paralleled in many British cities after the war, and it had also been a much earlier debate in the City after the Great Fire of 1666. That was Christopher Wren’s idealistic proposal for a redrawn City after the Fire, full of clear shapes and wide roads, but because of land ownership issues and much else, it never happened. After the second world war, a concern evident around many new city developments was whether those who were to live there actually wanted to be there, in new tower blocks rather than old, terraced streets. But the Cripplegate area of the City, seen here in the famous Agas map of, had been reduced from a population of 14,000 in 1851 to a population of just 48 a century later. So public consent here was less of a factor: it was the vision of the Corporation that would be the determining element. In the Buildings of England, Nicolaus Pevsner and Simon Bradley write of ‘the City’s readiness to finance the costly new housing, schools and buildings for the arts, which did not falter in the quarter-century from conception to completion’; that is a very, very generous interpretation of the long and fraught process which then unfolded. From the point of view of the arts, the complexities are more subtle. It would be wrong –though it makes a powerful narrative—to say that the creation of an international arts centre was part of the core concept of the Barbican from the beginning. In fact, the idea of providing world-class cultural amenities took a long time to become embedded in the thinking and planning of the scheme. Many elements came and went during that process. But eventually the commitment of the City did ensure that the Barbican as a unique residential estate housed a magnificent collection of venues for culture and education: a utopian vision of living with the arts at its core. How on earth did that happen?! As early as July 1952, the Public Health Committee of the Corporation was asked by the City’s Court of Common Council ‘to consider and report on the serious effects of the decrease of the resident population of the City’. The redoubtable figure of Eric Wilkins, then chairman of that Committee, had raised the spectre of the City losing its MP, and was determined to see off any threat to the Corporation. He became the leading, inexhaustible advocate for the Barbican as we know it. There were other powerful interest groups: Sir Gerald Barry became head of an informal ‘New Barbican Committee’ to campaign for the more commercial development of the area, and the London County Council (which had acquired formal planning powers over the area in the post-war Town and Country Planning Act of 1947) was also active in making proposals. By October 1954 the New Barbican Committee had sponsored a gleaming futuristic plan by architects Serge Kadleigh, William Whitfield and Patrick Horsbrugh; though this was rejected, it was influential on future plans as a comprehensive scheme for the area. These were heady days for urban planning and cultural development. The growth of cultural venues and festivals including the creation of arts centres was a widespread phenomenon in this period, as the war-time Council for the Encouragement of Music and the Arts became the Arts Council in 1945. The Edinburgh Festival, the Aldeburgh Festival, the Festival of Britain were all signs of this post-war renaissance. But more prosaically, the tensions of the early years of designing the Barbican development were not around the arts. They were rather between the pressures for major residential development and the provision of commercial office buildings that would earn income. Any echo there of recent debates about the use of the City office space?! In both the City and the London County Council there were progressive views and traditionalist approaches vying for dominance: already after the war the City’s unimaginative Planning Officer had permitted, as Lionel Esher puts it, ‘some fast movers to erect, luckily not on sites of major importance, old-hat buildings of quite incredible ugliness’. I won’t illustrate them. The LCC architects’ department on the other hand were committed modernists, especially interested in pedestrian-traffic segregation. City and LCC needed to come together in planning the new ‘Route 11’: a wide road running along the south of the blitzed site, it was to be a series of boldly angled 18-storey tower blocks of offices linked by walkways connected by bridges over the roadway. 2 This concept could have been extended to the whole Barbican area, and this early model shows a bigger commercial development proposed by Charles Clore on the western Aldersgate side. You can see here; this bit was never developed. But Eric Wilkins had other ideas, and he wanted to prioritise residential development. The architect Geoffry Powell had recently won an open competition to design the new Golden Lane Estate in the northern part of the blitzed area (in those days just beyond the City), and as a result had formed a new architectural practice with his colleagues Peter (always known as ‘Joe’) Chamberlin and Christoph Bon. Golden Lane had shown the City’s commitment to providing accessible, imaginative new housing, and CP&B’s colourful designs created a stir. Chamberlin Powell and Bon first produced a scheme for the whole Barbican area in June 1955, including possible recreation spaces, a small exhibition hall, six public houses (where did they go?) and four restaurants, and a new building for the Guildhall School of Music and Drama (GSMD) whose existing premises in John Carpenter Street were becoming dilapidated. Having as they quaintly put it ‘given some thought to the possibility of providing for mental recreation’, they considered the inclusion of ‘for instance, a concert hall, a theatre or a cinema’ which ‘although ideal, could not be justified commercially’. However, the New Barbican Committee in alliance with the LCC were not ready to agree, and proposed an alternative scheme for warehousing, industrial and residential development, shopping and schools. Eric Wilkins fought hard against this proposal, notably in a fierce address to the Court on 3 November 1955 denouncing the scheme as purely a project of the London Country Council. ‘Since when, my Lord Mayor, have we wanted the London County Council to ascertain our needs or plan for them? … Barbican must be developed for the well-being of the citizens of London whose interests we are here to represent’. Wilkins’s arguments won the day: the Court of Common Council turned the proposed scheme down on the grounds of over-development and excessive commercial provision. Chamberlin Powell and Bon produced their first key proposal document in May 1956: Barbican Redevelopment, with this slightly embryonic plan on the cover. So, this was the first glimmer of an interest in the arts in the all-encompassing Barbican scheme. Where was this balance between commercial gain and residential development going to end up? The decisive intervention came from Duncan Sandys, Minister of Housing and Local Government in a famous letter to the City on 28 August 1956: ‘I am convinced that there would be advantages in creating in the City a genuine residential neighbourhood incorporating schools, shops, open spaces and other amenities, even if this means foregoing a more remunerative return for the land’.
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